The Escape of Mr. Trimm

Hobart W. Trimm, lately president of the failed Thirteenth National Bank, rides a crowded day coach under guard toward a twelve-year federal sentence, and then the train is wrecked in a collision. He walks away unrecognized, listed among the dead, and still shut inside a pair of handcuffs nobody can open. That story opens the nine Irvin S. Cobb collected here in 1913, and the rest range widely: a courtroom case, a cub reporter’s scrape, a belled buzzard circling a Southern swamp county, and “Fishhead,” about a man with a fish’s face at an isolated lake. Lovecraft praised that last one in print, and scholars count it among the seeds of The Shadow over Innsmouth. Cobb wrote all of it as a working newspaperman, and it reads that way.